Who’s Doing the Legislating?

There’s a site out there called GovTrack that keeps statistics on Congress. One such statistic is the number of bills each Representative or Senator cosponsors. This isn’t the only statistic, and it isn’t some all-encompassing metric that’s determinative of a Representative or Senator’s performance—not all bills are the same, cosponsoring isn’t the only thing one can do with a bill, and there are functions served by Representatives and Senators that go beyond strictly legislating. Still, it’s interesting to see who’s doing the legislating, and on the the-fewer-laws-the-better side, it’s worth remembering that it takes legislation to repeal legislation.

You can peruse GovTrack yourself to check out more details and different metrics, but below are the total number of bills cosponsored by each U.S. Senator over the five-year stretch from 2015 through 2019, inclusive only of Senators who were in office continuously over that stretch.